Quotes on Ifs

Be thankful for problems. If they were less difficult, someone with less ability might have your job.

My folks tried to make a preacher of me and missed by a narrow margin… I would have made a good one if I hadn’t fallen into the fatal folly of reading anything I could lay hands on. With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist.

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.

The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that,_x000D_ if you let it alone,_x000D_ it will let you alone.

If a man owns land,_x000D_ the land owns him.

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.

Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - a house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Although you may be old or sick, it's not too late to take stock and ask yourself if you really are the person you want to be, and if not, who you do want to be.

If today's arts love the machine, technology and organization, if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times.

An empty canvas is full only if you want it to be full.

There are so many rules about play writing. I'd have a nervous breakdown if I followed them.

IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.

Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

I went to the school and put it to William, particularly, that if you find someone you love in life, you must hang onto it, and look after it, and if you were lucky enough to find someone who loved you, then you must protect it.

A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.

If the American people knew what we have done, they would string us up from the lamp posts.

You know economists; they're the sort of people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.

The sovereignty of scriptures of all religions must come to an end if we want to have a united integrated modern India.

The particular aspect of history which both attracts and benefits its readers is the examination of causes and the capacity, which is the reward of this study, to decide in each case the best policy to follow. Now in all political situations we must understand that the principle factor which makes for success or failure is the form of a state's constitution: it is from this source, as if from a fountainhead, that all designs and plans of action not only originate but reach their fulfillment.